At the precise moment that his father died, plowing his car into a massive bridge support on a clear summer afternoon while driving along a perfectly safe stretch of road, instantly decapitating himself, Tobey, then only seventeen, was sitting at the desk in his room, completing his geography homework. He blanked out for what he thought was just a few seconds, the way someone who is driving while tired might nod off before snapping instantly awake again, preferably in time to avoid the removal of his head from his neck between the C1 and C2 vertebrae. When Tobey looked down at the page on his table he found that he had drawn a pretty good picture of a mangled car at the base of a bridge support. He’d even managed to add the license plate, which was the same as the one on his father’s old Buick. This was surprising on any number of levels, not least because Tobey Thayer couldn’t draw for shit.
The call came within the hour. Tobey was left to deal with most of the funeral arrangements since his mother, who had loved his father dearly, was deep in shock, and would never really emerge from it. The mortician, John Welsby, who was an artist of a kind, suggested it might be possible to have an open casket, if the family so wished, as Freddie Thayer’s face and head were remarkably undamaged thanks to the angle at which the metal had entered his neck. Tobey declined. The circumstances of his father’s death were widely known, since his head had ended up on the grass verge, in full sight of passing motorists. He didn’t want folks speculating on what might lie beneath the buttoned-up collar of the corpse.
Tobey did not mention to anyone the drawing he had made. He felt a dreadful weight of guilt in the aftermath of the accident, and feared he might somehow have been responsible for his father’s death. After all, he had dozed off at precisely the moment his father’s car left the road. The autopsy showed no signs of the kind of catastrophic attack that might have caused his father to suddenly lose consciousness, and Freddie Thayer had no reason, as far as anyone knew, to take his own life. Even had he wanted to do so, his son knew, he would have found a more reliable way to end his days than gambling on the angle of a metal shaft jutting from a bridge support. He had also disliked any kind of fuss: as much in death as in life, he would have chosen to avoid a spectacle. The investigators speculated that his father might have fallen asleep at the wheel. But his son, being a teenager and therefore the center of the universe, was concerned that somehow a link had been created between his father and himself, and by falling asleep at his desk he had also caused his father to nod off, thereby precipitating the accident.
It was nonsense, of course, except for the fact of the drawing’s existence. He did not get rid of it, but kept it in a drawer, hidden among old school papers. His mother would never look there, not that there was much likelihood of a search. She spent most of her days weeping, and continued to do so until she went to join her husband not two years later. By then Thayer – no longer ‘Tobey’, but the surviving heir, and future of the business – had gone to work full-time at Freddie & Ron’s Discount Furniture Sales, under the careful guardianship of his father’s younger brother Ron, a bachelor who liked to vacation in South Beach, Florida, and who was, as one of the company’s salesmen put it, ‘queer as a Jewish Christmas.’ When Uncle Ron died, Thayer inherited the company in its entirety, and it became his alone in fact and name.
But in the years since his father’s death, Thayer had continued to experience what he thought of as ‘moments’: a glimpse of a woman walking between hayricks, her feet suspended a good six inches above the ground, the day before a picture of that selfsame woman appeared on news bulletins after her bruised and naked body was discovered in a drainage ditch; the bleeding of the walls in his local DMV while he was standing in line to have his lost license replaced, as though the building had developed stigmata, just hours before a man named Linus Crewell – Crewell by name, cruel by nature, Thayer later thought – walked in with a semiautomatic weapon and sprayed the room, killing five people and injuring seven, just because, he said, his fellow staff members had forgotten his birthday for the third year running; a painful blistering on his right hand as he passed the drive-thru window of a fast-food joint, only subsequently to learn that a fire in the kitchen an hour later had killed one person and left another blind.
And those were just the major occurrences: he’d lost count of the little ones, the incidents that might almost, under other circumstances, have been dismissed as coincidence or déjà vu. He supposed that he was psychic, although he tended to avoid using the word, even in his own mind, and he didn’t appear to conform precisely to any definition of the term that he could find.
And even if he was psychic, or telepathic, or whatever you wanted to call it, then it wasn’t anything like the way it was shown on TV or in the movies. He always felt a sense of dislocation when he had his moments, as though he might be experiencing a kind of waking dream, and with them came terrible headaches, and the urge – no, the need – to lie down and sleep until the pain passed. His visions and flashes were also unreliable: he’d experienced moments in grocery stores and movie theaters, and then nothing happened. Nobody got shot, nobody died, and life went on. Well, that wasn’t quite true: sometimes he’d pick up a paper and find that, in a grocery store or a movie theater hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away, someone had been shot, and someone had died. On those occasions, Thayer would take a sleeping pill and go to bed, because the possibility that he might be some kind of radar for death and suffering made him want to retire from life.
Thayer had done his research, although he’d been careful about it. He’d read up on Swedenborg, who believed in a spirit world that sat alongside our own, but remained beyond our comprehension, and had consulted the writings of John Wesley, whose strong belief in ghosts influenced early evangelical Methodism, a faith to which Thayer still adhered, if only gently. But Thayer was also interested in the medical and psychological theories surrounding his affliction. He reckoned he was the only discount furniture salesman who could discourse knowledgeably on the theories of Friedrich Nicolai, who argued that the appearance of ghosts might be linked to an imbalance of bodily humors, and John Ferrier, who viewed them as manifestations of a disordered perception. He knew of the experiments with magnetism of Mesmer and Puységur, and the idea of ghosts as projections of memory, of blasts of brain electricity, as reactions to electromagnetic disturbances. But none of these theories could explain what Tobey Thayer had endured ever since the day his father died.
His wife knew of his scourge. He’d revealed the fact of it to her after the incident at the DMV, and shown her the picture he’d drawn of his father’s accident. She’d learned to spot when he was having an episode, or when something might have happened that found an echo in one, but they were all so different from one another that even Thayer struggled to find any kind of pattern in them.
All except one. Ever since the gift had first manifested itself, he’d experienced a recurring dream of figures moving through fields, woods, houses. Among them were older and younger people, but no children. The styles of their clothing spanned centuries, but they were as much a part of the present as the past. He sensed a profound malevolence emanating from them, and from their leader in particular, a thin figure with red hair and a red beard, his profile peculiarly flattened, as though there were not quite enough of him to fully occupy three dimensions.
And he knew what they called themselves.
They were the Brethren.
Tobey Thayer woke in his bed in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, his wife snoring gently beside him. The clock read 11:37 p.m. His head was pounding.
‘Stop,’ he said to the darkness, and to the fading image of the woman walking through it. ‘They’re waiting for you.’
17
May MacKinnon did not turn back. She did not return to her bedroom, where her son waited, in order to call the police. The presence in the living room called to her, summoning her in a hundred voices and none, a great dissonant harmony alien yet familiar, like a song that, once heard, insinuates itself in
to one’s history, finding echoes in old melodies; a configuration once hidden, now revealed.
Step, step: warm amid the cold, rivulets of moisture running down the wood, the walls.
A great weeping.
In the living room stood a man, his pate bald, a ring of red hair hanging below it like the fingers of frosted ferns against the collar of his shirt, his neck beard leaving his upper lip bare, his age indeterminable. He wore a dark vest, trousers, and jacket, but each was part of a different suit. Even in the dimness May could tell that they did not quite match. His cheeks were ruddy, his lips fat, but his profile was flattened so that a plumb line might have been dropped from forehead to chin, touching the tip of his nose, and still have hung true. He was examining the photograph of Mike, May, and Alex that stood in a silver frame on the center of the mantelpiece. His tongue made a rhythmic clicking noise against his teeth, like the dripping of a tap or the ticking of an old clock.
Tck-tck-tck.
May tried to speak, but no words would come.
Tck-tck-tck.
A weight brushed against her back. She turned to see a young woman, her fingers deep in the bowl of potpourri that stood on a side table. The woman lifted her hand, and fragments of dried citrus and cinnamon ran through her fingers. She put her palm to her nose and sniffed. Her hair was red, and singly braided. The braid hung over her left shoulder, and her left hand toyed with it while the right plunged back into the bowl once more to crush the material inside. Like that of the older man by the fireplace, her profile was abraded, and she did not acknowledge May’s presence.
More movement: figures in the kitchen, the dining room, male and female. Some she thought she recognized from the woods. They were touching her possessions: sniffing, tasting, stroking.
Breaking.
And May found her voice.
‘Stop,’ she said. ‘They’re not your things.’
Instantly, all motion stopped. The voices in her head went silent. The man at the fireplace, still inclined in the direction of the photograph, stopped his clicking. Even the very dust motes in the air ceased to billow in their barely felt gusts. The only movement came from a winter moth, its wings beating so slowly that she could follow the agitation of them with her eyes, drawing a breath with their upward drift, exhaling with the downward. The insect came toward her, beat by beat, until it hung suspended before her eyes. It was banded in brown, beige fading to red at the forewings, gray at the hind wings, tipped in yellow. A male: the females were flightless, with stubs instead of wings. She was aware of them as an invasive species, capable of annihilating fruit orchards, and had no compunction about killing them.
She stared into its compound eyes. Its short antennae quivered. The clamorous voices faded from her head. There was only the beating of the moth’s wings. She could hear them now.
Ta-dump. Ta-dump.
‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘Why are you here?’
Ta-dump. Taaaa-dump. Taaaaa-dump.
The moth’s wings slowed their movement. Surely it must fall, she thought. It cannot hold its position. It must drop, and die.
A man ascended the stairs while the same man descended the stairs, two moments in time coalescing. He was not like the others. He was a pale blur, the impression of a figure against the dark, a ghost in the house.
Taaaaaaa-
The ghost on the stairs had a blade in his hand. A dark, sticky thread dripped from the tip to stain the oatmeal carpet.
Why am I not cold?
The moth froze.
In her bedroom, on the bed that she had once shared with her husband, the blood had turned the pillow red. May’s heart beat for the final time, and she exhaled as she was released. Her son tugged at the sleeve of her sweatshirt. He was weeping.
‘Stay, Mom,’ he said. ‘Stay.’
‘Go with her,’ said the voice of the man behind him, and Alex felt an awful sharpness enter his back and pierce his heart.
18
Parker left early for Providence. He toyed with the idea of dropping by to see Sam before he went, as she wouldn’t yet be on her way to school, then decided that, hard though it might be, it was better to leave things as they were. He and Frank had parted on reasonably good terms, at least by their standards, and the more time he gave Rachel to cool down, the better. But he felt a tug as he passed the nearest exit to the Wolfe property, so he distracted himself with Morning Edition on Vermont Public Radio.
The roads had been cleared overnight, but that familiar soft haze of cold hung in the morning air; not enough to restrict visibility, just sufficient to bring with it a sense of unreality. He felt as though the shadow realm that had manifested itself on the evening with Ross was slowly encroaching, contaminating everything it touched, blurring the edges of this world. He killed the radio and traveled on in silence, as though by doing so he might better attune himself to the cadences of the transformation.
When he was only an hour out of Burlington, he took a call from Ross on his cell phone. The FBI man was seeking a progress report. Parker told him he was on his way to Providence as they were speaking, which didn’t appear to impress Ross very much, who would have preferred if Parker were already there, and had been for some time.
‘What have you been doing?’ Ross asked.
‘With respect, that’s none of your business.’
‘“With respect”,’ said Ross, ‘is one of those terms that generally mean their opposite.’
‘Honestly, I did not know that.’
Ross didn’t rise to the bait.
‘I engaged you to perform a task.’
‘Which I’ve been doing, along with living.’
‘Then, with respect, your work-life balance may be out of sync.’
Parker was still trying to explain the difference between private individuals and bodies funded entirely from the public purse when Ross ended the call. He wondered if he should have told Ross that Angel and Louis would be joining him in Providence, and on Ross’s tab. On balance, he decided it was better that he hadn’t. It would only have made Ross worry, which would have been terrible. Anyway, Ross seemed to be worried enough as things stood. For a man whose life appeared not a little sad and dull, Jaycob Eklund was exercising SAC Ross considerably.
Parker started picking up signs for Providence. He didn’t know it very well. He’d been down to visit a couple of times, one of them with Rachel shortly before Sam was born. His memory was of a city that contained within itself the echo of the prettier town it once was, a past that took the form of old churches and buildings now scattered like pieces of a puzzle among anonymous apartment buildings and the big Providence Place Mall, at least until one headed across the river and into the streets around Brown University. He also vaguely recollected that a man’s hair could go gray and fall from his head before the crossing signal went green for pedestrians, so the citizens of Providence had jaywalking in their genes.
And as he drove, he continued to wonder just how much Ross was keeping from him about Eklund, and why.
19
‘This,’ said Angel to Louis, ‘is the best fucking idea anyone ever had since, like, Columbus bought a boat.’
The two men, along with Parker, were sitting in New Harvest Coffee & Spirits on Weybosset Street, part of the revived Arcade Providence, the nation’s oldest indoor shopping mall. On the one hand, Parker thought, Arcade Providence was therefore to blame for the deaths of cities, the decline of communities, and the Mall of America in Minnesota. On the other, anywhere that specialized in offering a man a good espresso along with single malt Scotch and a slice of pie could be forgiven a great deal, although possibly not the creation of the Mall of America. Someone had also clearly put some thought into the redevelopment of the Arcade, and it was now home to the kind of businesses destined to be described as ‘eclectic’. Harvest stood across from a store named Lovecraft Arts & Sciences, which reminded Parker, in a good way, of Strange Maine back in Portland. The world, he decided, would be poorer without such pl
aces.
‘It is pretty fine,’ Louis agreed. The single cube of ice in his glass clicked in an appealing manner, although it caused Angel to wince. The two men differed on many matters, fashion and politics not least among them, but it was generally accepted by those who knew them that Louis led the way in taste and discernment. Yet Angel had developed a certain appreciation for Scotch, linked in no small part to the theft of various interesting bottles and cases earlier in his criminal career. He and Louis could now afford to buy whiskies of considerable price and vintage, although Angel maintained that none ever tasted as good as those he had once pilfered for himself. ‘Stolen waters are sweet,’ he would say, ‘and bread eaten in secret is pleasant’, thereby proving that the devil could indeed cite scripture for his purpose.
Thus it was that Angel possessed very set opinions on the consumption of whisky, maintaining that ice detracted from the subtlety of the flavors. He liked to add a little water to his Scotch to open them up, but that was all. He had managed to whittle Louis down from three cubes to one, but it still pained him to witness its introduction. As for those who chose to pour soda or, God forbid, Coke into their whisky, Angel took the view that only a severe beating could set them straight.
Parker stuck to coffee. The server gave him a smile as she brought his Americano. It was a nice smile. It wasn’t promising anything, kindness apart, but it was the kind of smile that made a man feel good.
‘I think she likes you,’ said Angel.
A Game of Ghosts Page 7
